Power Distribution

Measurement Points

There are two types of measurement point in the above diagram. Most measure power passing through a particular point in the power distribution network, and are represented by a large X, along with an annotation of the voltmeter channel and measurement resistance. All measurement resistors have a tolerance (variation in resistance) of 1% or smaller.

A few points (3005) measure the voltage at a particular point in the power network. These are indicated by an arrow, and annotated solely with the voltmeter channel.

Example Measurements

Measurement Error

It should be cautioned that using a multiplexed voltmeter for measurement of power in a dynamic system has its downsides. The voltmeter does perform averaging in generating a measurement, but with a time period on the order of milliseconds.

Off Power

The tinderbox version of the XO-3 tablet doesn't have a battery, so the EC never goes into sleep mode. When "turned off" but plugged into the wall, the tablet takes around 50 mW (off.html).

Display Power

Running the display (without the backlight) consumes 635 mW (not counting some inefficiencies in the power distribution network). This is broken down into:

This both stops the frame buffer in the SoC and disables power to the external components (DCON and LCD module). This file was compared with ofw_idle3.html to obtain the above numbers.

Using Linux

The first attempt at measuring the power consumed by the display was to force the screen to blank using:

echo 1 > /sys/devices/platform/pxa168-fb.0/graphics/fb0/blank

The results can be seen at linux_nodisp.html. They show that no external components were powered down, as well as no reduction in power consumed by the SoC (compare it to linux_idle.html) which we expect to see. The backlight power is weird as well...

USB ULPI Interface

The idle power consumption of this interface is around 15 mW (Idle). When reading from a USB stick (copying a large file into /dev/null), it consumes around 22 mW (usb read) --- but there is significant power draw from +5V powering the USB device.